Brazil: 10 Claims to Fame

“The Girl from Ipanema” went walking from the pages of composer Antônio Carlos Jobim and poet-playwright Vinícius de Moraes’s song sheet in 1962 into pop music history, becoming the second most-recorded song ever (after the Beatles’ “Yesterday”) and helping to popularize Brazil’s most-famous musical export, bossa nova (“new trend”). A union of samba (a Brazilian dance and music style—more on that later) and cool jazz, bossa nova is purposefully simple and played on a limited number of rhythm instruments, such as guitar, berimbau (musical bow), drum, or single-note piano accompaniment. Jobim and guitarist João Gilberto are usually considered the genre’s founders. Although legend holds that Jobim and de Moraes wrote “The Girl from Ipanema” on a napkin in a bar, it was actually an outgrowth of their work for a stillborn musical comedy that they undertook after composing songs for the popular motion picture Black Orpheus.

Directed by Frenchman Marcel Camus and released in 1959, this French-Italian-Brazilian coproduction turned international eyes (especially those in Europe and North America) toward Brazil. Many Brazilians, however, saw Black Orpheus as an outsider’s simplistic depiction of their culture that glossed over the deprivation and danger at the root of life in Rio de Janeiro’s impoverished favelas (slums). Later films by Brazilian directors—such as Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1981), about children struggling for survival on the streets of São Paolo, and Fernando Meirelles’s City of God (2002), set in the Rio favela of the same name—provided more-unvarnished depictions of the Brazilian underclass. Still, Black Orpheus, Camus’s Oscar-winning transposition of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth to 1950s Rio de Janeiro, based on a theatrical libretto by Vinícius de Moraes, introduced international audiences to the frenetic dance-filled splendor of Rio’s Carnival celebration and to bossa nova.

Speaking of simplistic, it’s a little too reductive to characterize Carnival in Brazil as New Orleans’s Mardi Gras celebration on steroids, but that hasn’t stopped travel writers from doing so. The four-day pre-Lenten Carnival is Brazil’s most famous and exuberant holiday, combining a Roman Catholic festival with the lively celebrations of people of African ancestry. Millions of Brazilians spend much of their year constructing floats and making elaborate costumes for Carnival parades in “samba schools,” each of which includes thousands of children and adult dancers and musicians. The samba schools in Rio de Janeiro engage in the most-extravagant expression of the festival as they party hearty mainly along Copacabana beach.

Going to one of Brazil’s many famous beaches is far from a matter of casual indifference. Time spent in the sand and sun in Brazil is grounded in a very specific “culture of the beach.” Beachgoers do not bring snacks and drinks with them. Instead, they are served by an array of on-the-move vendors whose specialties include fruits and vegetables along with cold maté tea and agua de coco (coconuts split open so their water can be sipped through straws). When it comes to bathing suits, there is as little concern for modesty as there is material. Thong (tonga) bikinis for women date to the 1960s on Brazilian beaches, and Brazilian men have their own version of the bikini bottom, the sunga. Brazilian beachgoers are less likely to passively soak up the sun than to socialize or engage in sports. Beach volleyball was popular elsewhere (notably in the U.S.) long before it took off in Brazil in the 1980s, but now volleyball nets are ubiquitous on Rio’s beaches, and Brazilian teams have enjoyed great success in international competition.

Is capoeira a dance or a martial art? Kind of both. Let’s call it a dancelike martial art, even though its participants often engage in it as a competitive sport. The basic aesthetic elements of capoeira, brought to Brazil by enslaved people from west and west-central Africa, were recombined and reinterpreted to create a unique form of self-defense, both driven and disguised—as merely a dance—by its call-and-response musical accompaniment. That accompaniment is provided by ensembles that typically include berimbaus, atabaques (single-headed, standing, conical drums), a pandeiro (tambourine), an agogô (double bell), and sometimes also a reco-reco (scraped bamboo tube). The fluid acrobatic movements of capoeira—which are intended primarily as means of escape rather than attack but can still be lethal—include high leg swings and aerial somersaults.

You can’t get more Brazilian than the samba, the national dance (and the music in 4/4 time with syncopated rhythm that accompanies it). The samba originated in the state of Bahia among enslaved people and freed Africans, who took it with them when they migrated to Rio de Janeiro. There it was influenced by indigenous and European dance forms. The inhabitants of favelas organized themselves into the samba schools (effectively community clubs) that strut their stuff during Carnival. In the process, samba crossed the color line and rose to national popularity through the radio and recording industries in the 1940s. While the samba is also a ballroom dance, it really comes to life as a group dance, especially when performed by the ornately costumed samba schools during Carnival.

Although its economy has struggled of late, Brazil remains one of the world’s new economic powers, grouped with Russia, India, and China as the BRIC countries. Among its most-notable innovations is the country’s pioneering role in the use of ethanol—produced primarily from sugarcane—as a source of automobile fuel. As early as the 1930s, Brazil began blending ethanol into its gasoline. Then, in response to the surge in world oil prices in the early 1970s, the government introduced a major initiative to replace costly imported gasoline with ethanol as a motor fuel. Initially, cars were produced in Brazil that ran on 100 percent ethanol. In the 1990s a new generation of vehicles was made to run on a mixture of 20 to 25 percent ethanol. The early 21st century saw the development of flex-fuel cars that could run on any mixture of ethanol and gasoline.

Long before Black Orpheus brought Brazil to movie screens in North America, Hollywood had presented a different kind of caricature of Brazilians in the person of Portuguese-born “Brazilian Bombshell” Carmen Miranda, a singer-actress who became a star in roles such as “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat” in Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here (1943). Partly in response to that stereotypical presentation of Brazilians but much more as an attempt to depict the country’s social, political, and economic problems, the national filmmaking movement Cinema Novo (”New Cinema”) arose in the late 1950s and flourished until roughly the early 1970s. Determined to reflect real life, Cinema Novo filmmakers borrowed from Italian Neorealism as a well as from the low-budget aesthetics and auteur approach of the French New Wave. Cinema Novo’s leading light was Glauber Rocha, the director of Black God, White Devil (1964) and Antônio das mortes (1969). His films often portrayed Brazil’s history and social-political upheaval in a stylized violent manner.

Social awareness was also at the center of the Brazilian musical style called Tropicália, which burst onto the scene in the late 1960s. It was typified by the landmark album Tropicalia; or, Bread and Circuses (1968), which collected recordings by the artists who proved to be the style’s prime movers: singer-songwriters Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, and Tom Zé as well as the group Os Mutantes. Tropicália mixed traditional Brazilian rhythms (borrowing especially from bossa nova) with electric guitars and rock influences and, in the cases of Zé and Os Mutantes, dove into psychedelia and experimental music. Tropicália’s social criticism wasn’t very popular with Brazil’s military government, and, after being arrested and jailed for several months, Gil and Veloso went into exile.

In the end, as in the beginning, it all comes down to football (I know…soccer), which nobody plays quite like the Brazilians. Easy…I hear you Germans, Italians, Argentines, Spaniards, and all the rest of you. I said like the Brazilians, as in with a seemingly effortless grace and balletic athleticism. And they have won five World Cup championships (1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, and 2002). Actually, in Brazil, soccer still comes down to a single name, Pelé (short for Edson Arantes do Nascimento), arguably the greatest player in the history of the game, though a parade of single-name stars are on the tier just below his in the pantheon of Brazilian greats, including Romário, Ronaldinho, Marta, Garrincha, Cafu, Sócrates, Ronaldo, and Zico, to name just a few.